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Imitators, impersonators, analyzers and those paying tribute have made a fortune mining Marilyn Monroe’s image since she died in 1962 at age 36. Madonna made a big splash as the “Material Girl” in 1985, a riff on Marilyn’s famous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” song from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Marilyn’s late ex-husband, Arthur Miller, wrote After the Fall and much later Finishing the Picture about her. Last year, the big screen My Week with Marilyn scored a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Michelle Williams as Best Actress. Smash, the NBC television series that shows producers, composers and performers obsessing on how to capture her spirit for a Broadway musical, has been enough of a smash to be renewed.

Now Forever Marilyn: The Blue Ray Collection from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment ($99.98) gives us an opportunity to feast on the real thing in a deliciously restored seven-disc high def collection of films that sealed her fame, including Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch and How to Marry a Millionaire. Personally, I love the selection, but I do miss Bus Stop, where she got to show an even more vulnerable and affecting side of herself.

When seeking as I always do for a Texas connection, I received a slender link courtesy of Gregory Schreiner, Marilyn Monroe expert and the President and founding member of the longest running Monroe fan club in existence today, Marilyn Remembered: “On January 20th, 1961, en route to Juarez, Mexico, to obtain her divorce from Arthur Miller, Marilyn had a two-hour layover at the Dallas Love Field Airport. Supposedly, Marilyn sat alone in an airport cocktail lounge, watching John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.”

It turns out, however, I found a stronger Dallas link: my husband’s thoroughly Texan late parents met her in person when my father-in-law took the family to a business convention in Los Angeles in 1959. While Grandma Vaudie minded the kids in their hotel room, H.L. and Gene Granberry ran into a host of stars leaving the ballroom: Jayne Mansfield, who spent years in the Park Cities, Gina Lollobrigida, Dick Powell and his wife June Allyson, Chuck Connors and Marilyn Monroe.

H.L., being H.L., managed to get a laugh out of Gina Lollobrigida. When she told him she was working on a film called Go Naked in the World (that would be released in 1961), he responded, “I would LOVE to!”. And everyone was nice to them. But the one they were most impressed with was Marilyn Monroe. It wasn’t just her looks, although my mother-in-law used to say she had the most translucent, beautiful skin and natural beauty of any one she had ever seen.

“The word they kept using was gracious,” my husband recalled. “The thing that struck my mother was that she was very warm, very friendly, very unpretentious, down to earth and a little sad. She made the most lasting impression of anyone they met that day. They had a feeling she related more to them, to normal people, than she did to the Hollywood crowd.”

The people’s star. Maybe that is why. to this day, we still can’t let her go.